This episode of The Daily looks at how air conditioning has become both our answer to a warming planet and a major obstacle to actually tackling it. When Willis Carrier invented the first version of air conditioning in 1902 (to control the moisture content of printed documents), it suddenly made places like Las Vegas, Dallas and Houston, which had previously been almost uninhabitable, attractive places to live (often requiring an additional artificial water supply). Because energy was cheap, buildings could be inefficient: glass instead of stone, air conditioning instead of windows, and less clever architectural features like window awnings. Many people now live in these "greenhouses", which are not only very vulnerable to power outages, but also contribute to 30 per cent of greenhouse gases in the United States.

South African photographer Dillon Marsh combines photography with computer-generated images of material extracted from the landscape he portrays. In the series For What It’s Worth, the artist visits former copper, diamond, gold, and platinum group metal mines that are now scars on the landscape to create salient visualisation of extraction. 

The Palabora mine, pictured above, is almost 2 km wide and over 800 m deep. 4.1 million tonnes of copper have been mined here, but this total is dwarfed by the massive hole left behind.

One of the most striking and instructive graph in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report: It lists the potential contribution to net emissions reductions by 2030 for different migration options in sectors such as energy, AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses), buildings, transport and industry. In addition to the width of the bars, it also shows colour ranges for the cost of the reduction potential of the options.

The areas with the highest potential contributions are solar and wind energy, halting deforestation, better agriculture, strengthening ecosystems and hydrogen in industry.

Wind and solar energy are cheap up to 2 GtCO₂-eq per year, while the often-promised carbon capture is expensive from the outset and has very little potential.

The graphic is part of the Summary for Policymakers in “Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.

Throughout history, civilisations have fallen and sometimes almost disappeared altogether. Paul Cooper tells their stories, but always in relation to our own time: how similar was the Bronze Age’s dependence on the eponymous metal to today’s dependence on oil? Could the Vikings’ refusal to adapt in Greenland be similar to today's inactivity? And how could the Sumerian’s change in diet be a role model for us today?

The disappearance of the indigenous people of Easter Island is particularly instructive: in contrast to the commonly told fable of a society responsible for its own downfall, Paul Cooper tells of their fate as the result of Western imperialism.

As well as being interesting, the podcast is excellently produced – often with multiple narrators and music from the time of the story. In this interview, Cooper talks about his “catalogue of the worst leaders”, which is also available as a book.

Since 2004, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Sussman has explored harsh climates from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert to photograph the world’s oldest living organisms. This includes Pando, an aspen colony in Utah with a root system around 80,000 years old, and the Llareta plants in South America, which grow 1.5 cm annually and live for over 3,000 years. Despite their longevity, such ecosystems face threats from climate change and human activity.

Her photographs are meditations on “deep time” – timescales that are outside of our human, physiological experience of time – and often show the most versatile adaptation to the harsh climate conditions these organism are living in.

Agnes Denes (*1931 in Budapest) is a pioneer in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. One of her most striking installations is “Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan” from 1982. During a three month period the artist and volunteers planted a wheat field in one of the last undeveloped sections of Manhattan. An area right next to the Twin Towers and Wall Street called Battery Park City. The artist gained more attention recently, but is still overlooked in her prophetic art.